Oskar Kokoschka und Österreich: Facetten einer politischen Biografie by Bernadette Reinhold (review)

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• Oskar Kokoschka und Österreich: Facetten einer politischen Biografie by Bernadette Reinhold
• Monica Strauss

Bernadette Reinhold, Oskar Kokoschka und Österreich: Facetten einer politischen Biografie. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2023. 338 pp.

With the publication of her encyclopedic volume Oskar Kokoschka und Österreich: Facetten einer politischen Biogafie, Bernadette Reinhold, who heads the Oskar Kokoschka Center at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts, has joined the disciplines of art history and political inquiry to great effect. The span of Kokoschka’s long life (1886–1980) runs parallel to the evolution of modern Austria from the end of Habsburg rule to the Second Republic. Having passed away at the age of ninety-four in 1980, the artist was not subjected to the country’s self-reckoning that began just a few years later. That later political revision, however—the public acknowledgment of Austria’s wartime complicity in Nazi crimes—prompted Reinhold to reexamine the legacy under her care. There could be no stronger statement of her mission than the citation in her introduction of Ilse Aichinger’s 1946 essay “Aufruf zu Misstrauen.”

Kokoschka was not initially a political artist, but playing with the public perception of his persona became part of his art early on. Exaggerating the role of victim after the Kunstschau scandals in 1908 and ’09, he flaunted his rejection by shaving his head—a punishment usually meted out to convicts. By displaying his new guise in a series of self-portraits and a carefully posed photograph, he mocked his detractors. In the decade that followed, he continued to dismantle social pieties by making art out of his own vulnerabilities. He depicted himself as the insecure lover of Alma Mahler, for instance, or as a soldier devoid of glory after being wounded in World War I.

Kokoschka’s career took off in the 1920s, despite the political upheavals of the now small and poor country to which Austria had been reduced. He traveled widely, was sought after as a portraitist, and exhibited internationally. He did not initially turn his back on the fascist corporate state established in 1933, hoping it would support the founding of his own art academy. Only after his plan was rejected in 1934 did he give up on the instabilities of his home-land by moving to Prague.

By then the Czech city had become a haven for exiles from Hitler’s Germany. It was there that Kokoschka was transformed into a political artist. He wrote pointed articles against the Nazi terror, took upon himself the production and distribution of posters asking for help for children caught [End Page 136] in the Spanish Civil War and made his inclusion in the “Entartete Kunst” exhibition the subject of a pugnacious self-portrait. By the fall of 1938, having gained Czech citizenship through the intervention of Masaryk (whose portrait he had painted), he escaped to England. He not only became a central figure in the antifascist activities there but also gained a reputation as a philanthropist when he began the practice of donating part of the money he earned from sales of his work to the cause of needy children.

At war’s end, Kokoschka set about astutely reviving his career. In 1947 he became a British citizen to move more easily across the continent. By 1953, he had settled in usefully neutral and linguistically more familiar Switzerland. And he began his campaign for the recognition he was convinced he deserved from the country he had left more than a decade before. That effort required the accommodations that are at the heart of Reinhold’s “political” biography.

Reinhold’s approach is a subtle one. She does not dwell on Kokoschka’s evasions but brings them up almost en passant, as it were, between discussions of Vienna’s postwar conservative cultural politics. In this way the parallels between country and native son resonate. Like his fellow countrymen, he never refers to antisemitism or the Holocaust. When he publishes his autobiography in 1971, he does not cite such crucial supporters as Hans Tietze or Otto Kallir but does sing the praises of Carl Moll, who had supported the wartime regime. When a known ex-Nazi proves to be the ideal...